News Flash: Florida Voting & Election Results May Not Be Valid

I know! Hard to imagine, isn't it?

From AP:

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean called for another election in the race to replace Rep. Katherine Harris), saying the declared Republican winner should not be sworn in until election questions are sorted out.

"You cannot seat someone if you don't have an election that's valid," Dean said in a taped interview scheduled to air Sunday on a Tampa Bay-area news channel. The St. Petersburg Times reported the comments in its Thursday editions.

Democrat Christine Jennings is contesting her loss to Republican Vern Buchanan and has sued for a new election. On Thursday, Jennings said she will ask the U.S. House to take the extreme measure of conducting its own investigation into the election.

State officials certified Buchanan as the winner by just 369 votes. But Jennings claims that touch-screen voting machines in Sarasota County malfunctioned in the District 13 race and possibly cost her the election.

More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than in the rest of the district.

"There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don't know what happened to their votes. You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they'd be calling for a new election, and they'd be right," Dean said.

The state is conducting an audit of the Sarasota voting machines.